Patrick Leahy

You have marshalled help through critical appropriations.

I think we have a great leadership team in place at the Guard Bureau.

It is very important that Guard and Reserve who are deployed be able to vote.

I hope that the bureaucracy will get off its duff and make sure that we develop a mail system that can get the mail that our deployed troops deserve.

I think we have to remain diligent to follow up to see that we support the Guard and the Reserve as they support us.

General, will you or your staff keep me posted on how it goes? Because I want to--I really do have a very strong interest in this.

I wouldn't go to bat like that unless they were that good.

We strongly support your effort to transform the Guard's and the entire Air Force capability to meet the Nation's needs.

I think, probably more than any time since I've been in the Senate, we see the integration and the need of using the Guard with our regular forces.

I commend you for doing that, Mr. Secretary. I think it is extremely important.

You have to have a system in there that will encourage troops to come forward.

They have earned an awful lot more than that.

I find the suicide rate alarming among our forces.

Yes, would you have your staff talk to mine. Let us know where we are on that, because it is something I have followed very closely.

I cannot really think of anything bad to say about him.

I think it is critical. I have heard great things about its performance. I hope we can get the funds to expand it.

A lot of that was pushed in by the Congress.

Will you give it the allocation?

No, no. Mr. Principi, it is not that we want more, it is we need more.

Mr. Secretary, in your budget is a summary on page 1 to 6, take, for example, medical research spending.

They know that it is a request that nobody is going to accept, hoping that then Congress will find the money somewhere.

The administration submitted a budget clearly short by several hundreds of millions of dollars.

I really get worried--and I have told you this before--on the Veterans Affairs budget.

Last year we went back and forth to add $1.6 billion to the administration's budget request for fiscal year 2004.

I hope that you will do this the right way, and let us work together.